Jen Katz-Buonincontro, PhD, MFA, is a Professor in the School of Education. Dr. Katz-Buonincontro is the former Chair of the Faculty Steering Committee for the School of Education and former Chair of the Social Science Committee and member of the Institutional Review Board (Drexel). Internationally, Katz-Buonincontro serves as President-Elect of Division 10, Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts with the American Psychological Association (APA), as well as Associate Editor for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, a journal with APA. She also serves as Past Chair of the Arts and Learning Special Interest Group (American Education Research Association), and past Program Chair (Division 10-APA).
Dr. Katz-Buonincontro is 2016 recipient of the Daniel E. Berlyne Award for Outstanding Research by an Early Career Scholar from Division 10: Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA). Helping children and adults learn to think and act in creative ways that optimizes their academic and professional success is the central motivation of her research, teaching and service. Current studies focus on creative thinking and problem solving as a function of learning domain-specific content knowledge. These studies on beliefs about creativity, creative performance and academics extend past research on creativity, motivation and identity with a distinctive emphasis on learning. Her research aims to clarify and build socio-cognitive theories of creative agency to ultimately advance educational research with knowledge and applied teaching tools. Her scholarship traces inborn versus learnable beliefs about creativity and talent in philosophical tracts and political rhetoric, documents the process of learning how to effectively problem solve through the arts in leadership development and integrates the arts into leadership curriculum and STEM education.
Grant-funded projects include the Creative Interdisciplinary Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) program, funded by the National Science Foundation, which infuses creativity research into new courses to develop teams of graduate student researchers. Her second grant project is MakeSPACE [Schoolwide Placed-based Arts in Creative Engagement] involving Arts Integration into Science, Reading and Math with the Arts in Education Dissemination Grant under the U.S. Department of Education. Prior grants include an NSF project examining student creativity in engineering technology and faculty workshops, and her Drexel Career Development Award applied the experience sampling method to the study of creativity in leadership.
Courses she teaches are Creativity and Innovation in STEM Education, Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis and Mixed Methods Research; as well as Leadership Development courses.